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It's been a really weird couple of weeks around here. The last article I put together, The Art of Wikigroaning, apparently got linked to on a bunch of blogs, a few newssites, and several fishing journals. Wikigroaning became very popular. It looks like "Dr." David Thorpe and Mark "pre" / "Street Cactus" / "The Late Prince of Falcons (Rest in peace, baby)" D'Arensbourg have created something truly great.

As you probably know, Wikipedia is the free encyclopedia that anybody can edit and change. If you weren't around last time, Wikigroaning is the game of finding pairs of similar Wikipedia articles-- one nerdy, one not. Then, you take a look at both and see how informative, long, and complete they are. Is the nerdy one quite a bit moreso? Did you just groan audibly out of frustration, sadness or disbelief? You've just found a wikigroan!

For example:

Yamato class battleship - The largest battleships ever constructed. They were built and used during the deadliest conflict in human history.Galaxy class starship - The entire Enterprise crew turned into animals once, but thankfully a pregnant cat saved the day. Notice that this article is much longer.

Most folks can see how this might be a fun diversion. The occasional person, though, got a bit butthurt. At least one guy posted a blog comment saying this game is ridiculous because we should be using all of our wasted time making Wikipedia articles better. I wanted to ask that guy why he was wasting his time posting blog comments about my article when he could be helping make my articles better, but I didn't feel the need to front.

After all that business happened, a whole bunch of email came in and my inbox was blowing up for days. I wanted to do a follow-up to share some of them, because lots are just fantastic. Here we go:

If this game has taught me anything nerdy, it's that the Wikipedia is like the Staff of Ra. It sure looks neat at first glance, but it's basically useless until you do this one certain thing with it, at which point it casts a funky new light and reveals all sorts of scary crap you didn't know about. Later on, your head melts.

I don't want to turn off any prospective buyers or Fallout fans, but '76 seems to possess a myriad of questionable decisions that, at best, can hamper certain quests, and at worst, hamper absolutely everything else. I've chosen to list a small number of bugs and poor game design decisions encountered during my exhaustive trip through the wasteland.